The CLDE Framework is built around one over-arching goal and four key components of college civic learning and democracy engagement. The over-arching goal is each student’s individual development of purposeful civic engagement. From the beginning of college and as they progress, students regularly explore democratic principles as well as their own experiences with democracy. They examine issues they care about and practice productive dialogue with those who disagree. Ultimately, they arrive at their own choices about the role they want to play in a democratic society and about what the future of democracy can be.

To support students’ development of purposeful civic engagement, the CLDE Framework includes four intersecting components:

• Democratic knowledge and levers for change;
• Bridge-building and problem-solving skills;
• Practical experience and projects, including collaborative work in real-world settings; and
• Career-related civic and ethical learning.

Figure 3 suggests the kinds of knowledge, skills, and practical experience students should gain across all four of these interconnected areas of civic and democracy learning.

Your Major on the Ballot is designed to help draw connections between democracy and the different fields students are studying in the classroom. Illustrating the connection between issues that students care about and their choices on the ballot can help motivate students to participate in the democratic process in ways that more conventional political messaging often falls short. 

Some students aren’t aware of how the issues that impact them every day, such as the fields they study, are connected to voting. This is especially true for majors that are not traditionally considered “political” or majors with historically low rates of voter engagement like those within the STEM fields. This resource focuses on identifying laws, policies, regulations, and government funding sources that affect different fields, as well as opportunities for academic research to influence policy.

The Inquiry and Dialogue Toolkit and the resources curated here offer research and guidance on the importance of academic expression, deep inquiry, and dialogue as well as how to operationalize these values in effective ways. This requires attention to relationships—between students and faculty, between students and students, and between students and academic material. In order to make this compendium as practical as possible, we have divided the toolkit into the five key stages we consider to be central to the process of navigating productive academic inquiry and dialogue:

• Preparing yourself, as the instructor
• Preparing your students: Cultivating the environment
• Preparing your students: Cultivating skills
• In class: How to facilitate, design, and navigate productive dialogue and inquiry when it’s a planned part of the course, and when it occurs unexpectedly
• Reflection and iterative growth

Class discussions on policy, politics, and social issues, including those related to the 2024 election, can support students in a range of ways. They can help students progress towards course learning objectives. They can also promote democratic engagement by fostering students’ confidence, motivation, and capacity to make informed decisions at the polls. Moreover, students may develop lifelong civic skills and mindsets through discussions of important issues of our time. Lastly, they can provide space for students to process election rhetoric, news, and results affecting them and their communities.

To successfully support these goals, thoughtful design and facilitation of these discussions is crucial. CRLT and the Ginsberg Center have developed a framework for structuring classroom discussions around the election, relevant for any topic where the stakes are high for students, whether academically, socially, or in terms of the real-life consequences of broader debates and policy decisions. A key component of this framework is selecting activities that are aligned with your discussion’s learning goals. A well-aligned activity provides clear guideposts for students, helping them navigate complex and potentially contentious issues with purpose and direction.

In this blog post, we consider five common learning goals for class discussions around policy, politics, and social issues. We highlight structures that facilitate each goal, as well as a few specific activities that offer practical options for your class discussions, including those leading up to and following election day.

To fulfill their research, teaching, and civic missions effectively, American colleges and university need to provide students with opportunities to study and deliberate the most difficult and politically charged issues facing communities, the nation, and the world. We envision campus communities that achieve those objectives as places where uncomfortable and controversial topics can be named and discussed freely, without the threat of unreasonable suppression and in ways that preserve collegial learning environments. We believe that dissent and conflict can be transformative catalysts and present the proverbial "teachable moment" for student reflection, study, growth, and change.

The current national context for political conversations has been characterized as divisive and ineffective. At the same time, hate speech and repeated, offensive language directed at people because of their gender, race, or other legally protected status can create toxic and discriminatory learning environments that cannot be ignored by institutional leaders. There is a dire need for students - and faculty and staff - to learn to create new norms that value both free expression and inclusion. We suspect that, because this balancing act is hard to do, professors and staff avoid doing it. Avoiding politically charged topics is bad for student learning and, ultimately, bad for democracy.

Promoting Democracy Teaching Series offers programs and resources designed to help instructors across academic disciplines harness the momentum of each election season to promote civic learning and democratic engagement while improving their teaching practice. A collaborative partnership between Ginsberg Center and Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, Promoting Democracy Teaching Series is offered during U.S. presidential and midterm election cycles.

The series provides instructors with timely opportunities to reflect on the connections between election issues and their academic disciplines, learn strategies for promoting civic & democratic engagement through teaching, and better prepare for the impacts of election rhetoric on students and instructors alike. In coordination with UMICH Votes, it also highlights information about university policies around political activity in the classroom as well as resources to encourage such non-partisan activities as student voter registration and engagement with democratic processes.